A method that enables scientists to grow cells on easily generated fine structures provides new insights into cell migration

Whereas a cut knee often reduces children to tears, adults are more likely to be distressed by the fear of cancer. In both cases, that is wound healing and the growth and spread of tumours, a particular characteristic of the body’s cells plays a crucial role: their capacity to move in their tissue environment. Together with colleagues from Japan, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart and the University of Heidelberg have developed a very promising method for the study of cell movement. The new method enables the examination of the collective behaviour of small groups of cells in an environment that imitates living tissue. Using this new method, the Stuttgart cooperative project was able to study the collective spreading behaviour of epithelial cells in the early stages of healing processes. The information gained from this study confirms the potential offered by the new method in generating new insights into cell migration, a process that has been under investigation for decades.

The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft has once again been successful in winning support from the European Research Council (ERC)

With seven Advanced Grants, the MPG is Germany’s top recipient of EU funding. In response to its fourth call for applications, the ERC conferred a total of 294 of these lucrative research awards, of which 52 went to German universities and research institutions.

Precise insight into how two microscopic surfaces slide over one another could help in the manufacture of low-friction surfaces

The problem exists on both a large and a small scale, and it even bothered the ancient Egyptians. However, although physicists have long had a good understanding of friction in things like stone blocks being pulled by workers into the shape of a pyramid, they have only now been able to explain friction in microscopic dimensions in any degree of detail. Researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Stuttgart-based Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems arranged an elaborate experiment in which they pulled a layer of regularly ordered plastic spheres over an artificial crystal made of light. This enabled them to observe in detail how the layer of spheres slid over the light crystal. Contrary to what one might imagine, the spheres do not all move in unison. In fact, it's only ever some of them that move, while the others stay where they are. This observation confirms theoretical predictions and also explains why friction between microscopic surfaces depends on their atomic structure.

A heat engine measuring only a few micrometres works as well as its larger counterpart, although it splutters

What would be a case for the repair shop for a car engine is completely normal for a micro engine. If it sputters, this is caused by the thermal motions of the smallest particles, which interfere with its running. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart and the Stuttgart-based Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have now observed this with a heat engine on the micrometre scale. They have also determined that the machine does actually perform work, all things considered. Although this cannot be used as yet, the experiment carried out by the researchers in Stuttgart shows that an engine does basically work, even if it is on the microscale. This means that there is nothing, in principle, to prevent the construction of highly efficient, small heat engines.

The software enables electron microscopes to extract more information about the composition of crystals.

A new software called QED (Quantitative Electron Diffraction), which has been licensed by Max Planck Innovation, has now been released by HREM Research Inc., a Japan based company, which is developing products and services in the field of High-Resolution Electron Microscopy. QED allows transmission electron microscopes to acquire novel kinds of data, opening up new possibilities in electron crystallography.

Magnetic vortex cores, which can be used as particularly stable storage points for data bits, can now be switched much faster

Microscopically tiny ferromagnetic platelets exhibit a phenomenon which could be exploited in the future for particularly stable magnetic data storage: so-called magnetic vortex cores. These are needle-shaped magnetic structures measuring 20 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) in diameter. Five years ago, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research) in Stuttgart found a way to reverse the magnetic field needles despite their stability using only a tiny amount of energy so that their tips pointed in the opposite direction. Such a switching process is necessary to enable the vortex cores to be used in data processing. The Stuttgart scientists have now discovered a new mechanism which makes this switching process at least 20 times faster and confines it to a far smaller region than before. Magnetic vortex cores could thus provide a means of data storage which is stable, fast and greatly miniaturized.

Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University and Bernhard Schölkopf from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart have been awarded the 2011 Max Planck Research Award, which is endowed with 750,000 euros for each award winner. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society honour two outstanding scientists who have brought significant progress to a research field that is at the interface of different disciplines.

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